


your excuse for a lover, your own mountain to climb

by boxedblondes



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Mild Sexual Content, POV Eve Polastri, POV Third Person, gratuitous space metaphors, post-3x08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:53:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24737968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxedblondes/pseuds/boxedblondes
Summary: Here is something Eve knows: that each star in the night sky glows with ancient light – light that’s traveled thousands, millions of years to reach her eyes. Bright as they may seem, some of the stars she’s looking at right now are already dead. Cosmic ghosts. She looks at them and looks right into the long-ago past. There is wisdom in the distance, if only she knows how to read it.A severance, a melding, a genesis.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 62
Kudos: 366





	your excuse for a lover, your own mountain to climb

**Author's Note:**

> 2 weeks without Killing Eve is like: I have so many emotions and nowhere to put them!
> 
> \- Warnings for alcohol use and potentially dubious consent (they're tipsy, but everything is consensual)
> 
> Title from "Let Me In" by Snowmine (thanks Mei)

When she was a child, Eve became briefly but emphatically obsessed with space. She would tell anyone and everyone, at the slightest provocation, that when she grew up, she was going to be an astronaut – _the first person to go to Mars!_ It was the thing she wanted most in the world, the only future she could envision for her someday adult self.

But it was bigger than that, too, this longing. Eve didn’t just want to go to space, she wanted to _know_ _everything_ about it. If the astronaut plan didn’t work out, she would settle for a life in which she could spend every night staring up at the stars instead, all night, every night, only going to sleep when her vision blurred from overuse.

She grew out of this phase, of course, as she got older and the realities of adult life started to make themselves more urgently known. But she never quite grew out of that childhood wonder, the realization that the world is so much bigger and more beautiful than one could ever hope to comprehend; that there is an infinity beyond this tiny corner of the universe.

Tonight, the sky is clear, cloudless. The stars are dimmed by light pollution, and Eve mourns this, wishes she could see more than just the faint glimmer of their presence. Years ago, in the muggy Connecticut summers, she would lie in the driveway and play connect-the-dots with her eyes, tracing the invisible lines between the stars. She used to know the name of every single constellation, the familiar summer shapes as well as the strange and distant winter ones. 

Here is something Eve knows: that each star in the night sky glows with ancient light – light that’s traveled thousands, millions of years to reach her eyes. Bright as they may seem, some of the stars she’s looking at right now are already dead. Cosmic ghosts. 

_Do you ever think about the past?_

_All the time. It’s_ all _I think about._

It’s hard to see much of anything through the glare of lights from the bridge, but still Eve strains her vision until she can make out the bright eyes of Saturn and Jupiter hovering on the horizon. Their twin gaze is softened with distance, but still sharp enough to cut her to the bone. Saturn, the planet of responsibility, structure. Jupiter, the planet of growth, of mercy, of miracles. _Turn around_ , they seem to say to her. _Turn the fuck around_.

So she does. 

Here is something else Eve knows: one lightyear is equivalent to 9.5 trillion kilometers. The closest star to Earth (besides the sun, of course), is nearly 4.3 lightyears away. It only takes a handful of seconds for Villanelle to turn around. But to Eve, waiting and waiting, it feels like she’s traveled to the end of the galaxy and back.

But Villanelle does turn, eventually. She looks at Eve, and smiles, soft enough to break her heart, even from this distance… and then she turns back around and continues walking. 

By the time Eve realizes what’s happening, that Villanelle is just _walking away from her_ again, she’s made it nearly to the end of the bridge. Eve watches her go, disbelieving, and thinks about gravity, about magnetic pulls, about the improbability of the universe and the inevitability of its demise. And as her stomach sinks to her feet, she’s faced with her own reality: the blank nothing that is her future without Villanelle in it. 

_No_ , she thinks. _Please. I can’t do this again._

The Earth rotates around its axis at a speed of approximately 460 meters per second. The Tower Bridge is 240 meters long from end to end. Eve runs, and swears she can feel the earth turning beneath her feet.

By the time she reaches Villanelle, she’s entirely out of breath and her vision’s started pulsating around the edges. Still, she gathers her last vestiges of air to shout a strained little “Villanelle!” across the last bit of space separating them, and hopes to god it’s enough.

Villanelle stiffens at the sound of her name and turns around so fast it’s a wonder she doesn’t break her neck. At the sight of Eve – panting desperately behind her – her eyes go wider than Eve’s ever seen them. It fills her with a strange sort of pride to recognize the expression as one of genuine surprise.

“Eve,” she says, voice tremulous with disbelief. “What are you doing?”

“I’m – ” Eve presses both hands against her chest as she continues gulping down air. “Oh, Jesus.” 

Villanelle places gentle hands against her shoulders and guides her down onto a nearby bench. “You’re scaring me,” she says.

“Too much running,” Eve chokes out. 

That seems to placate Villanelle for the time being. After a moment, she begins to rub slow circles into Eve’s back. It feels surprisingly nice. Soothing. Eve breathes and breathes and thinks about how lucky she is to still be breathing. How lucky they both are to be alive right now. 

“Okay,” she says once the stars have stopped dancing around the edges of her vision. “I’m okay now.”

Villanelle’s hand leaves her back at once. Eve misses its warmth as soon as it’s gone, and wishes she were brave enough to ask Villanelle to put it back. _It’s not that hard_ , some part of her brain says. _Just ask her_. But then –

“Where’s your bag?” Villanelle asks.

“Oh.” This is going to be embarrassing to explain. “I threw it off the bridge.”

Villanelle is silent for a long moment. “You did what.”

“Well, I _figured_ since we’re on the run from, uh, everyone that I probably didn’t need that stuff anymore.” Villanelle snorts beside her. Eve pokes an accusing finger in her face. “Don’t laugh at me! It makes sense!”

“Sure,” Villanelle says. “Of course.”

Eve’s never seen Villanelle laugh up close like this before. She finds herself enamored with the way Villanelle’s eyes crinkle up at the edges, little starbursts creased into her skin. 

“ _You_ don’t even have a bag,” she says. “Where do you keep your… everything?”

“I have everything I need right here,” Villanelle says, smiling. And then she leans in, slow and careful, and presses her mouth to Eve’s.

Eve wants to tease her, say something like _Real smooth, asshole,_ but the kiss knocks the wind out of her all over again. Villanelle kisses her and it is inexorable and unexpected. Villanelle kisses her and it is nothing like she ever expected, nothing like that sharp-edged moment on the bus. Villanelle kisses her and everything makes sense, even the parts that shouldn’t – the death and fear and manipulation. All of it, all of it.

When they pull apart, Eve swears she can see the moon reflecting in Villanelle’s eyes. “Okay,” she says, more to herself than anything. “Okay.”

“So…” Villanelle says, watching Eve as she pokes her tongue out to wet her lips. “What’s the next step in your master plan, kill commander?”

Very little of Eve’s brain is actually online at the moment, so it takes her a few moments to fully process the question. “Well,” she says finally. “I guess we need to find a hotel room or something.” 

“Why can’t we go to your house?”

“First of all,” Eve says. “It’s definitely not a house. It’s a studio they tried to sell me as a one-bedroom flat. And secondly, I haven’t really... been there in a bit.” More like a month, if she’s being honest. 

Villanelle looks bewildered. “Why not?” she asks. “Where else have you been sleeping?”

And Eve knows better than to be evasive, knows that Villanelle _will_ drag the truth out of her sooner or later. So, “I don’t know if you remember, but you broke into my house to leave that creepy bear in my bed.”

“Oh, so _now_ it’s a ‘house.’”

Eve ignores her. “And, really, I thought it was just a precursor to you trying to kill me again. So I made... alternate arrangements.”

Villanelle goes deathly silent. When Eve chances a look at her face, her expression is plainly murderous. “Who have you been sleeping with?” she asks, cold and dangerously measured. 

“God, nobody!” It’s true, of course, for which Eve is inordinately thankful. She pities her nonexistent lover for the slow death Villanelle would have inflicted upon them. “I was just crashing with one of the… my colleagues.”

“The woman?” Villanelle asks, with a curious quirk to her brow.

“No, Jamie. The boss.”

Villanelle exhales noisily. “He’s too old for you, Eve.”

“He’s literally – he’s _maybe_ a year older than me!”

Villanelle just gives her a long look, then flicks a glance down at her own body. “Okay…” she says slowly. “And?”

“Shut up.”

They do end up at a hotel eventually, because Eve wasn’t lying about the state of her flat. Honestly _she_ ’s scared to see what it looks like after several weeks’ worth of abandonment. The dirty dishes alone would probably be enough to give Villanelle a heart attack.

Eve heads straight for the mini bar once they get to the room, but Villanelle throws out a hand to stop her. “Those things are a scam,” she says. “Shitty alcohol, _and_ they overcharge you.”

“Well, I need a drink.”

“I’ll call for room service,” Villanelle says, already on her way to the bedside phone. What do you want?”

“Uh… a bottle of red?” 

Villanelle actually turns around at that, a slow and theatrical one-eighty. “Eve,” she says, plaintive. “Do you really hate yourself _that much_?”

“What?”

She pouts dramatically. “Red wine is by _far_ the worst kind of alcohol.”

“I like it,” Eve says, shrugging. It’s basically all she drinks at this point, because it’s cheap and it _works_ – not that she’s about to explain all of that. Villanelle makes the call, staring at her with woeful, pitying eyes the whole time.

She makes a show of ordering a bottle of _your most expensive red wine_ , tacking on a vodka for herself. Eve snorts a little at that, unconsciously, and Villanelle shoots her a glare that says, quite plainly, _Don’t you dare_.

By the time room service gets there, the adrenaline of the day has burned away, leaving Eve feeling slow and sleepy. She’s sure Villanelle’s feeling much of the same, though she’s better at hiding it. They both end up sitting on the bed, backs against the headboard, sipping at their drinks and remaining pathetically close to sober.

The silence is surprisingly comfortable, but still Eve finds herself searching for something to say to break it. It’s a sensation she’s had often throughout her life: the overwhelming feeling that the present moment has stretched to its breaking point, and that she needs to change the subject – or start one – before it snaps to pieces.

“Are you okay?” Villanelle asks, sudden enough to make her jump a little. “You have a very intense look on your face.

“Just thinking,” Eve answers lamely.

“About what?”

“Hmm. You.” It’s at this point Eve realizes one and a half glasses of wine on an empty stomach might be affecting her slightly more than she’d thought. “I didn’t mean – ” she starts, but Villanelle is already curling onto her side to look at her more closely.

“Eve,” she says, in a voice thick and syrupy as honey. “Do you like me? Do you _like_ like me?”

Eve laughs, self-conscious, and covers her face with her hands. “Shut up.”

“I’m getting a lot of mixed signals here. You did say a _lot_ of romantic things on that bridge.”

Eve takes another sip of her drink and feels it burn its way down into her chest. “Yes,” she says. “Of course I like you. It’s ruined my life.”

“Ruined?” Villanelle asks, and something about the way she says it makes Eve realize she’s hurt her. _What happened?_ she wonders. When did Villanelle start wearing her emotions on her sleeve like this?

“Not _ruined_ ,” Eve clarifies. “I’m exaggerating.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. Changed, I guess.” She laughs. “That’s an understatement. You’ve… upended me.” In her inebriated state, it sounds strangely poetic, and she lets the words hang there in the air for a moment.

“You’ve upended me, too,” Villanelle says.

“Do you like _me_?” Eve asks, feeling young and giddy. “Like that, I mean?”

Villanelle wrinkles her forehead. “Of course. I like you _so_ much.”

“That’s nice,” Eve says. 

And it is. It’s nice to be liked, wanted. It’s nice to know she occupies at least some small part of someone else’s thoughts. It’s intoxicating – more so than the alcohol, even – and it fills her with an unfamiliar bravery.

“Do you still think about me?” she asks. “When you – ” she flicks a glance down Villanelle’s body, “you know?”

“Yes,” Villanelle says, so quick and assured it could be a _duh_. “All the time. Do you?”

Eve feels hot all over, combustible. “Yeah,” she says. “Sometimes.”

Villanelle’s gaze is locked on hers now, dark and intense. “Do you ever think about having sex with me?”

“Yes,” Eve says, just as quickly, and it comes out a whisper.

This is dangerous territory. Eve is tired and tipsy and, quite frankly, still in disbelief about everything that’s happened today. She _wants_ Villanelle in a frighteningly visceral way – has wanted her for quite some time now – and yet she’s still hesitant to make the first move. 

_I’ve never done anything like this before_ , she remembers saying, on a different bed in a different country. It feels like ages ago, lifetimes between then and now. It’s still a true enough statement, but nine months of internet searches and oddly realistic dreams have done enough to help her feel like she _could_ do it, theoretically, if the moment were to arise.

And yet, here’s the moment. And here is Eve: sitting rigidly against the headboard, both hands holding tight to her wineglass because she still has no idea what to do with them, let alone the rest of her. And just like that, all her courage abandons her.

“Well, anyway,” she says, after a horrendously long silence. “It’s been a long day, so I guess I’ll get ready for bed.”

She sets the glass down on the bedside table and reaches up to tie her hair into a loose bun, pantomiming normalcy. Villanelle pushes herself off the mattress and Eve has just one singular moment to think she’s headed to the en suite bathroom before she’s circled around to Eve’s side of the bed.

“Um,” Eve says, as Villanelle strips down to underwear and an innocuously plain white t-shirt. She leaves her shed clothes on the carpet, like they don’t cost literal thousands of dollars. “What are you doing?”

Villanelle just smiles and clambers back onto the bed, kneeling astride Eve’s splayed legs. “What do you think,” she says, and settles down atop Eve’s thigh. 

Even through her own clothes, Eve can feel the warmth and presence of her, can feel exactly where Villanelle’s body is touching hers. The realization drops hot and molten in her gut: _She’s here. She’s touching me. This is happening_. 

“Villanelle – ” she says, thoughts turning slow and hazy. “We shouldn’t do this.”

“You said you wanted to have sex with me,” Villanelle says, hot against her ear. “Five minutes ago. I heard you say it.”

“I know,” Eve says and tries not to focus on the way Villanelle is now rocking slowly against her leg. “But I meant sometime when we’re not both drunk.”

“I’m not drunk,” Villanelle says. “Just a little tipsy. And you’ve only had one glass of wine.” Leaning back from Eve, she holds up a single finger to emphasize. “ _One_.”

“But – ” Eve says. She can’t think of an argument to follow that.

Villanelle shifts again and Eve feels like she’s on fire. She looks down, just a glance, and the sight almost unravels her entirely. There’s a streak of dampness on the fabric of her pants now, Villanelle working a black hole into the space between them.

“You don’t even have to do anything,” Villanelle says. Her voice has gone breathy, like Eve’s punched all the air out of her chest. “Just give me five minutes.”

“ _God_ ,” Eve says, though she doesn’t really mean to. Languidly, hardly aware she’s even doing it, she slides her own hand under the waistband of her pants. Between the build-up and the way Villanelle is grinding deliciously against her thigh, she might not make it more than five minutes either.

Villanelle laughs at her, amused and indulgent. “Is this good for you?”

“I mean, _obviously_.” Eve tips her head back against the headboard and relishes the way pleasure coils her body like a spring. “But it’s not really how I expected this to go.”

“What did you expect?” Villanelle reaches out a hand and threads her fingers through the hair at the base of Eve’s skull. She tilts Eve’s head forward until they’re face to face, adopts a coquettish grin. “Something kinky?”

Her tone is a barbed wire. It catches in Eve’s chest, sparks the embers of her arousal into something more incendiary. “Kind of, yeah,” she says, each word riding out on its own breath.

“Is this kinky enough for you?” Villanelle asks, before leaning in to kiss her, slow and dirty. Again, Eve wants to make a joke about her delivery, _Where did you learn your pickup lines?_ The absurdity of the situation has her laughing against Villanelle’s mouth, trying and failing to kiss her back with any sense of rhythm. She comes like that, mid-laugh, joy sparking along her every nerve ending.

She’s still laughing as she comes down, sunspots blooming bright behind her closed eyes. 

“Eve?” Villanelle asks, sounding vaguely concerned – though not enough to stop riding Eve’s thigh. “Did you just have an orgasm or a psychotic break?”

“Little bit of both, I think.” Eve feels light, weightless, borne away on the high of being alive and whole and _here_ , right now, in this very moment. It’s the best sex she’s ever had, and she never even got undressed.

Villanelle’s still moving against her, making soft sounds, and Eve reaches up to brush strands of sweaty hair away from her temples. She thinks of that moment back on the bridge, of telling Villanelle she couldn’t see a future without her in it. Her beautiful face. 

Here, again, is something Eve knows: the solar system, this small portion of the universe, is 4.6 billion years old. The sun will die in another 7.5 billion or so. In comparison, the average human lifespan is 79 years, barely a grain of sand in the hourglass of time. The universe blinks and a handful of generations lives and dies. 

_We are so small_ , Eve thinks. As a child, this thought frightened her. Now, it fills her with nothing but wonder. _We are here,_ she thinks, and kisses Villanelle with all the life she has to give. _I am here_ , and she slides her hands to Villanelle’s waist, holds her firm against her own leg.

_When I try and think of my future, I just… see your face. Over and over again._

_It’s a very beautiful face_.

And it is. “Beautiful,” Eve murmurs into the space between their lips, and Villanelle shakes apart against her.

“God _damn_ ,” Villanelle says some moments later, voice shaky and full of reverence. 

And something about hearing _her_ , of all people, say those words has laughter bubbling up again in Eve’s chest. She feels dizzy, nearly sick with this overwhelming happiness. She feels like a teenager, the kind of teenager she never was – reckless and carefree. “Good?” she asks.

Villanelle rolls off her to flop down spread-eagle on the mattress. “Yeah,” she says, looking up at Eve through sleepy, half-lidded eyes. “But not what I was expecting either. Like – ” opening her eyes wide, “ _at all_.”

“To be fair,” Eve says. “When have we ever done anything the normal way?” 

She pries her stiff back away from the headboard and winces at the pull in her bad shoulder. There’s been a lot going on recently. Who can blame her for neglecting the daily physio regimen they prescribed her at the hospital in Rome?

“Eve?”

“I’m fine.” Eve tugs her turtleneck over her head with a grimace, and sets to work peeling her pants off her sweaty legs.

“Did I hurt you?” Villanelle asks, probing her bare legs with cold fingers as she searches for a wound.

“No,” Eve says. “Well, I mean, yeah. But not tonight. It’s um…”

“Your back,” Villanelle fills in, her fingers relocating to the space below Eve’s shoulder blade. “Where I shot you.”

Eve is immensely grateful she doesn’t have to be the one to say it. (Although, she reminds herself, they _are_ going to have to talk about it sometime.) “Yeah,” she says. “It gets kind of wonky sometimes.”

“I’m sorry,” Villanelle says, quiet enough it can’t be anything but genuine. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I wish you hadn’t,” Eve says. “But I’m kind of glad you did, too.” She shrugs. “It put some things in perspective.”

“What are you talking about?” Villanelle’s voice rises to a near-shout. “I could have killed you! You could have _died_!”

“Well, I’m obviously very happy to be alive.”

Villanelle’s bony fingers dig into a particularly tender spot between two ribs and Eve hisses through her teeth. “Maybe you could pay me back for all the hospital bills,” she says. “If you’re feeling apologetic.”

“I don’t have any money anymore,” Villanelle says. “Well, I _do,_ but the Twelve will kill us if I try to get it.”

 _Us_ , Eve thinks with a sugary rush of affection. “Well, all of _my_ stuff is at the bottom of the Thames right now. So.”

Villanelle’s forehead thumps down on her shoulder. “Eve,” she says, long-suffering. “I love you so much, but you are _so fucking stupid_ sometimes.”

And between the exhaustion and everything that’s happened today, Eve’s brain is absolutely fried. At this point, she genuinely can’t process either the “I love you” thing _or_ hearing Villanelle swear for perhaps the first time ever, let alone both.

“Oh my god,” she says instead. “I have to go to sleep soon or I’m actually going to die.”

“You wouldn’t _die_ ,” Villanelle says. “Trust me, the human body can go for a _long_ time without sleeping.”

Eve slides her toes against the cool sheets at the bottom of the bed and thinks about how nice it would be to curl up underneath them. “Well, if we’re going to be on the run, I guess I’ll find out soon enough.” She yawns around the words. “But not tonight.”

When Eve turns out the lamp, the room goes completely dark for a few moments before her night vision kicks in and the lights of the city bleed their way into the room. For that all-too-brief time, Eve can almost believe she and Villanelle are the only two people in the whole universe, that the space around their bodies is all that exists in the deep, black nothing. 

As the darkness softens into the familiar gray shapes of desk-chair-window-wall, Eve closes her eyes in an attempt to prolong the feeling. But the moment’s passed. So instead she gets comfortable under the cool sheets and turns onto her side, back to the curtained window.

“Hello,” Villanelle says. Her voice is a whisper, a secret just for the two of them.

Eve can’t quite see her face, even from this close, but she knows well enough what it looks like. Besides, it’s enough just to feel the warmth radiating off her skin, the valley their bodies make in the mattress, gravity beckoning them even closer. “Hello,” she says back.

“Will you tell me a bedtime story?” 

Eve laughs. “Like what?”

“Anything,” Villanelle says, curling herself even closer into the curve of Eve’s body. “I just want to hear you talk.”

“Okay,” Eve says. “Let me think.”

She noses into the hair still piled into a messy bun at the top of Villanelle’s head, feeling emboldened by the dark and the memory of Villanelle’s strong thighs pressing greedily against her own. Villanelle smells clean and dangerous, earthy and ethereal. She is a mystery Eve wants nothing more than to unravel. 

“What do you know about stars?” Eve asks after a while.

“Not much.”

“Well, technically, almost everything in the human body once came from one. We’re all basically products of supernovae.” It’s a fact that Eve can never quite wrap her head around, the enormity of it. She’s spent her life chasing its meaning.

Villanelle is quiet for a moment. “Do you think we were part of the same star?” she asks.

“I don’t know.” Eve kisses the top of her head and breathes in the smell of her – little bits of stardust from the beginning of time. “I hope so.”

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I am on tumblr [@boxedblondes](https://boxedblondes.tumblr.com/).


End file.
